Media Lens bericht:
'october 22, 2008
PROPPING UP PROPAGANDA
IRAQ, CLIMATE AND THE CORPORATE MEDIA'S FEAR OF THE PUBLIC
PROPPING UP PROPAGANDA
IRAQ, CLIMATE AND THE CORPORATE MEDIA'S FEAR OF THE PUBLIC
Since starting Media Lens in 2001, we have learned that corporate journalists are very often ill-equipped, or disinclined, to debate vital issues with members of the public.In 2004, the esteemed Lancet medical journal published a study showing that 98,000 Iraqis had most likely died following the US-led invasion (http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/ images/journals/lancet/ s0140673606694919.pdf). John Rentoul, chief political correspondent of the Independent on Sunday, responded with sarcasm when we challenged him about his dismissal of the peer-reviewed science:
"Oh no. You have found me out. I am in fact a neocon agent in the pay of the third morpork of the teleogens of Tharg." (Email, September 15, 2005)
In 2006, a follow-up Lancet study estimated that the death toll had risen to 655,000. Today, the probable death toll exceeds one million. (Just Foreign Policy, http://www.justforeignpolicy.org /iraq/iraqdeaths.html; 'Update on Iraqi casualty data', Opinion Research Business, January 2008; http://www.opinion.co.uk/ Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88) In 2003, Roger Alton, then editor of the Observer, also did not take kindly to a reader accusing him of peddling Downing Street propaganda on the eve of the invasion:
"What a lot of balls ... do you read the paper old friend? ... 'Pre-digested pablum from Downing Street...' my arse. Do you read the paper or are you just recycling garbage from Medialens?" (Email, February 14, 2003)
Last week, Matt Seaton, editor of the Guardian's Comment is Free website, was asked why he dismissed readers of Media Lens as a mere "lobby", but not readers who post comments on his website. Seaton replied:
"because, unlike MediaLens readers, users of Comment is free are not given directives to spam journalists and others - and would not mindlessly follow such directives if they were" (Email, October 15, 2008)
The constant journalistic refrain is that the public is made up of ill-informed idiots, mindless "blog-o-bots" (Robert Fisk, interviewed by Justin Podur, 'Fisk: War is the total failure of the human spirit', December 5, 2005; http://www.rabble.ca/), launching "an attack of the clones" (BBC journalist Adam Curtis, email to Media Lens, June 18, 2002). A moment's thought would tell these journalists that the people responding to our alerts are interested in our efforts precisely to expose methods of public deception, manipulation and control. The whole point of what we are doing is to challenge all forms of psychological goose-stepping.Little of this professional contempt for public challenge ever makes it into the open. The media sections of the press, where journalism ought to be scrutinised, are reserved for professional navel-gazing, ego-burnishing and insider gossip. At best, media commentary is inoffensive, rarely straying from the anodyne; and even then, only to mock easy targets like the Sun or the Daily Mail. At its worst, corporate media 'analysis' props up a brutal propaganda system in which "politics is the shadow cast on society by big business", as the US social philosopher John Dewey observed.
Swooning Over The British Press
Consider Stephen Glover, media commentator in the Independent, who earlier this month gloried at the supposedly vibrant state of the British press. Glover, one of the founders of the Independent in 1986, described his pleasure in "fingering the redesigned Daily Telegraph" which "looks quite handsome". Glover also liked the "much-improved Times", while the "revamped Independent" positively "crackles with energy." (Stephen Glover, 'It has its faults, but we should be proud of the British press', the Independent, October 6, 2008) As though in the pay of "the teleogens of Tharg", Glover asked innocently, "Am I starry-eyed?" Undoubtedly. He was also suffering from blinkered, power-friendly vision. It is only two months since Glover belatedly, and superficially, pointed to the failings of the UK press in challenging government propaganda on Iraq:
"I am still awaiting an apology from those newspapers that assured their readers, before the invasion of Iraq, that there was absolutely no doubt that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction." (Stephen Glover, 'Press were wrong on Iraq', August 11, 2008)
But media performance was far worse than Glover would have us believe, as we reminded him at the time (email to Stephen Glover, 'No mea culpa from the British press', August 19, 2008; http://www.medialens.org/forum/ viewtopic.php?p=9849#9849). The British media were willing accomplices in the perverse political portrayal of Iraq as a threat to the West. And, because the media simply buried the facts, not many people know that Iraq had already been devastated by thirteen years of brutal United Nations sanctions leading to the deaths of over a million people. Around half of them were children under five. The two Westerners who knew Iraq best - Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, senior UN diplomats in Baghdad who resigned over the "genocidal" sanctions - were virtually shut out of British press and broadcasting. (For more on their expert and excluded analyses, see Hans C. Von Sponeck, 'A Different Kind of War', Berghahn Books, New York, 2006; and Denis Halliday, interviewed by David Edwards, Media Lens, May 2000; http://www.medialens.org/ articles/the_articles/articles_2001/iraqdh.htm)The ideological role played by the corporate media, as faithful stenographers to power, continued up to and beyond the illegal 2003 invasion. This was a war of aggression, in contravention of the UN Charter, and recognised in law as the "supreme international crime". If the British media had performed its fairy-tale role, and actually held power to account, perhaps there would have been no Iraq invasion, no cataclysm, no outpouring of grief and misery. It is all too easy for media insiders to be seduced by the superficial glamour and "vibrancy" of newspapers, and to divert their eyes from the blood-soaked reality underneath.At the Guardian's website, an ostensibly rival media commentator, Roy Greenslade, noted that the Independent had ditched its media section. Greenslade, a Guardian veteran and now professor of journalism at City University in London, wrote:
"... 'the media' is a part of modern life that deserves to be monitored consistently. Its influence appears to grow rather than diminish. There needs to be public scrutiny of the people who own and control the various media platforms and of those who manage and operate it on behalf of those owners and controllers." (Greenslade blog, Guardian website, October 6, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/ media/greenslade/2008/oct/06/theindependent)'
"Oh no. You have found me out. I am in fact a neocon agent in the pay of the third morpork of the teleogens of Tharg." (Email, September 15, 2005)
In 2006, a follow-up Lancet study estimated that the death toll had risen to 655,000. Today, the probable death toll exceeds one million. (Just Foreign Policy, http://www.justforeignpolicy.org /iraq/iraqdeaths.html; 'Update on Iraqi casualty data', Opinion Research Business, January 2008; http://www.opinion.co.uk/ Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88) In 2003, Roger Alton, then editor of the Observer, also did not take kindly to a reader accusing him of peddling Downing Street propaganda on the eve of the invasion:
"What a lot of balls ... do you read the paper old friend? ... 'Pre-digested pablum from Downing Street...' my arse. Do you read the paper or are you just recycling garbage from Medialens?" (Email, February 14, 2003)
Last week, Matt Seaton, editor of the Guardian's Comment is Free website, was asked why he dismissed readers of Media Lens as a mere "lobby", but not readers who post comments on his website. Seaton replied:
"because, unlike MediaLens readers, users of Comment is free are not given directives to spam journalists and others - and would not mindlessly follow such directives if they were" (Email, October 15, 2008)
The constant journalistic refrain is that the public is made up of ill-informed idiots, mindless "blog-o-bots" (Robert Fisk, interviewed by Justin Podur, 'Fisk: War is the total failure of the human spirit', December 5, 2005; http://www.rabble.ca/), launching "an attack of the clones" (BBC journalist Adam Curtis, email to Media Lens, June 18, 2002). A moment's thought would tell these journalists that the people responding to our alerts are interested in our efforts precisely to expose methods of public deception, manipulation and control. The whole point of what we are doing is to challenge all forms of psychological goose-stepping.Little of this professional contempt for public challenge ever makes it into the open. The media sections of the press, where journalism ought to be scrutinised, are reserved for professional navel-gazing, ego-burnishing and insider gossip. At best, media commentary is inoffensive, rarely straying from the anodyne; and even then, only to mock easy targets like the Sun or the Daily Mail. At its worst, corporate media 'analysis' props up a brutal propaganda system in which "politics is the shadow cast on society by big business", as the US social philosopher John Dewey observed.
Swooning Over The British Press
Consider Stephen Glover, media commentator in the Independent, who earlier this month gloried at the supposedly vibrant state of the British press. Glover, one of the founders of the Independent in 1986, described his pleasure in "fingering the redesigned Daily Telegraph" which "looks quite handsome". Glover also liked the "much-improved Times", while the "revamped Independent" positively "crackles with energy." (Stephen Glover, 'It has its faults, but we should be proud of the British press', the Independent, October 6, 2008) As though in the pay of "the teleogens of Tharg", Glover asked innocently, "Am I starry-eyed?" Undoubtedly. He was also suffering from blinkered, power-friendly vision. It is only two months since Glover belatedly, and superficially, pointed to the failings of the UK press in challenging government propaganda on Iraq:
"I am still awaiting an apology from those newspapers that assured their readers, before the invasion of Iraq, that there was absolutely no doubt that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction." (Stephen Glover, 'Press were wrong on Iraq', August 11, 2008)
But media performance was far worse than Glover would have us believe, as we reminded him at the time (email to Stephen Glover, 'No mea culpa from the British press', August 19, 2008; http://www.medialens.org/forum/ viewtopic.php?p=9849#9849). The British media were willing accomplices in the perverse political portrayal of Iraq as a threat to the West. And, because the media simply buried the facts, not many people know that Iraq had already been devastated by thirteen years of brutal United Nations sanctions leading to the deaths of over a million people. Around half of them were children under five. The two Westerners who knew Iraq best - Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, senior UN diplomats in Baghdad who resigned over the "genocidal" sanctions - were virtually shut out of British press and broadcasting. (For more on their expert and excluded analyses, see Hans C. Von Sponeck, 'A Different Kind of War', Berghahn Books, New York, 2006; and Denis Halliday, interviewed by David Edwards, Media Lens, May 2000; http://www.medialens.org/ articles/the_articles/articles_2001/iraqdh.htm)The ideological role played by the corporate media, as faithful stenographers to power, continued up to and beyond the illegal 2003 invasion. This was a war of aggression, in contravention of the UN Charter, and recognised in law as the "supreme international crime". If the British media had performed its fairy-tale role, and actually held power to account, perhaps there would have been no Iraq invasion, no cataclysm, no outpouring of grief and misery. It is all too easy for media insiders to be seduced by the superficial glamour and "vibrancy" of newspapers, and to divert their eyes from the blood-soaked reality underneath.At the Guardian's website, an ostensibly rival media commentator, Roy Greenslade, noted that the Independent had ditched its media section. Greenslade, a Guardian veteran and now professor of journalism at City University in London, wrote:
"... 'the media' is a part of modern life that deserves to be monitored consistently. Its influence appears to grow rather than diminish. There needs to be public scrutiny of the people who own and control the various media platforms and of those who manage and operate it on behalf of those owners and controllers." (Greenslade blog, Guardian website, October 6, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/ media/greenslade/2008/oct/06/theindependent)'
1 opmerking:
Interessante vraag van programmaontwikkelaar journalistiek aan de UvA Theo van Stegeren op denieuwereporter.nl:
'Stel alle kranten, publieke en commerciële omroepen, tijdschriften, weblogs en overige media zouden aan de beurs genoteerd zijn, van welke van die media zou je dan nu aandelen kopen, laten we zeggen met een beleggingshorizon van vijf jaar? En waarom?'
Ik vermoed, gezien de context van de vraag, dat Theo met zijn vraag bedoelt waar de toekomst van de journalistiek ligt. Ik heb hem een tegenvraag gesteld: stel dat we niet in een democratie zouden leven, zouden aandelenkoersen dan ook de drijfveer zijn bij het behoud van onafhankelijke journalistiek?
Laat in hemelsnaam behoud van de democratie de drijfveer zijn, niet de aandelenkoersen.
www.denieuwereporter.nl/?p=1874
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